“Tea, great, yes,” I said. To my surprise, I was relieved that Jacob’s ego seemed to weather his miserable surroundings just fine. Also to my surprise I felt tenderly toward him. And toward the scent of old citrus.
On the main table I noticed what looked like the ragtag remains of some Physics 101 lab experiments: rusted silver balls on different inclines, distressed balloons, a stained funnel, a markered flask, a calcium-speckled Bunsen burner, iron filings and sandpaper, large magnets, and batteries that could have been bought from a Chinese immigrant on the subway. Did I have the vague feeling that “a strange traveller” might show up and tell “extravagant stories” over a meal of fresh rabbit? I did.
I also considered that Jacob’s asking me to murder him had just been an old-fashioned suicidal plea for help.
“Here, here.” Jacob brought me tea (in a cracked porcelain cup), and I thought—somewhat fondly—of Ilan’s old inscrutable poisoning jokes.
“Thanks so much.” I moved away from that table of hodgepodge and sat on Jacob’s futon.
“Well,” Jacob said gently, also sitting down.
“Yes, well.”
“Well, well,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m not going to hit on you,” Jacob said.
“Of course not,” I said. “You’re not going to kiss my hand.”
“Of course not.”
The tea tasted like damp cotton.
Jacob rose and walked over to the table, spoke to me from across the compressed distance. “I presume that you learned what you could. From those scribblings of Ilan. Yes?”
I conceded—both that I had learned something and that I had not learned everything, that much was still a mystery to me.
“But you understand, at least, that in situations approaching grandfather paradoxes very strange things can become the norm. Just as, if someone running begins to approach the speed of light, he grows unfathomably heavy.” He paused. “Didn’t you find it odd that you found yourself lounging so much with me and Ilan? Didn’t it seem to beg explanation, how happy the three of us—”
“It wasn’t strange,” I insisted, and surely I was right almost by definition. It wasn’t strange because it had already happened and so it was conceivable. Or maybe that was wrong. “I think he loved us both,” I said, confused for no reason. “And we both loved him.”
Jacob sighed. “Yes, O.K. I hope you’ll appreciate the elaborate calculations I’ve done in order to set up these demonstrations of extraordinarily unlikely events. Come over here. Please. You’ll see that we’re in a region of, well, not exactly a region of unlikeness, that would be a cheap association—very Ilan-like, though, a fitting tribute—but we’ll enter a region where things seem not to behave as themselves. In other words, a zone where events, teetering toward interfering”—I briefly felt that I was a child again, falling asleep on our scratchy blue sofa while my coughing father watched reruns of “Twilight Zone”—“with a fixed future, are pressured into revealing their hidden essences.”
I felt years or miles away.
Then this happened, which is not the crux of the story, or even the center of what was strange to me:
Jacob tapped one of the silver balls and it rolled up the inclined plane; he set a flask of water on the Bunsen burner and marked the rising level of the fluid; a balloon distended unevenly; a magnet under sandpaper moved iron filings so as to spell the word “egregious.”
Jacob turned to me, raised his eyebrows. “Astonishing, no?’
I felt like I’d seen him wearing a dress or going to the bathroom.
“I remember those science-magic shows from childhood,” I said gently, tentatively. “I always loved those spooky caves they advertised on highway billboards.” I wasn’t not afraid. Cousin or no cousin, Ilan had clearly run away from Jacob, not from me.
“I can see you’re resistant,” Jacob said. “Which I understand, and even respect. Maybe I scared you, with that killing-me talk, which you weren’t ready for. We’ll return to it. I’ll order us in some food. We’ll eat, we’ll drink, we’ll talk, and I’ll let you absorb the news slowly. You’re an engineer, for God’s sake. You’ll put the pieces together. Sometimes sleep helps, sometimes spearmint—just little ways of sharpening a mind’s ability to synthesize. You take your time.”
Jacob transferred greasy Chinese food into marginally clean bowls, “for a more homey feel.” There at the table, that shabby impromptu lab, I found myself eating slowly. Jacob seemed to need something from me, something more, even, than just a modicum of belief. And he had paid for the takeout. Halfway through a bowl of wide beef-flavored noodles—we had actually been comfortable in the quiet, at ease—Jacob said, “Didn’t you find Ilan’s ideas uncannily fashionable? Always a nose ahead? Even how he started wearing pink before everyone else?”
“He was fashionable in all sorts of ways,” I agreed, surprised by my appetite for the slippery and unpleasant food. “Not that it ever got him very far, always running after the next new thing like that. Sometimes I’d copy what he said, and it would sound dumb coming out of my mouth, so maybe it was dumb in the first place. Just said with charm.” I shrugged. Never before had I spoken aloud anything unkind about Ilan.
“You don’t understand. I guess I should tell you that Ilan is my as yet unborn son, who visited me—us—from the future.” He took a metal ball between two greasy fingers, dropped it twice, and then once again demonstrated it rolling up the inclined plane. “The two of us, Ilan and I, we collaborate.” Jacob explained that part of what Ilan had established in his travels—which were repeated, and varied—was that, contrary to popular movies, travel into the past didn’t alter the future, or, rather, that the future was already altered, or, rather, that it was all far more complicated than that. “I, too, was reluctant to believe,” Jacob insisted. “Extremely reluctant. And he’s my son. A pain in the ass, but also a dear.” Jacob ate a dumpling in one bite. “A bit too much of a moralist, though. Not a good business partner, in that sense.”
Although I felt the dizziness of old heartbreak—had I really loved Ilan so much?—the fact that, in my first reaction to Jacob’s apartment, I had kind of foreseen this turn of events obscurely satisfied me. I played along: “If Ilan was from the future, that means he could tell you about your future.” I no longer felt intimidated by Jacob. How could I?
“Sure, yes. A little.” Jacob blushed like a schoolgirl. “It’s not important. But certain things he did know. Being my son and all.”
“Ah so.” I, too, ate a dumpling whole. Which isn’t the kind of thing I normally do. “What about my future? Did he know anything about my future?”
Jacob shook his head. I couldn’t tell if he was responding to my question or just disapproving of it. He again nudged a ball up its inclined plane. “Right now we have my career to save,” he said. I saw that he was sweating, even along his exposed collarbone. “Can I tell you what I’m thinking? What I’m thinking is that we perform the impossibility of my dying before fathering Ilan. A little stunt show of sorts, but for real, with real guns and rope and poison and maybe some blindfolded throwing of knives. Real life. And this can drum up a bit of publicity for my work.” I felt myself getting sleepy during this speech of his, getting sleepy and thinking of circuses and of dumb pornography and of Ilan’s mattress and of the time a small binder clip landed on my head when I was walking outside. “I mean, it’s a bit lowbrow, but lowbrow is the new highbrow, of course, or maybe the old highbrow, but, regardless, it will be fantastic. Maybe we’ll be on Letterman. And we’ll probably make a good deal of money in addition to getting me my job back. We have to be careful, though. Just because I can’t die doesn’t mean I can’t be pretty seriously injured. But I’ve been doing some calculations and we’ve got some real showstoppers.”
Jacob’s hazel eyes stared into mine. “I’m not much of a showgirl,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “You can find someone better than me for the job.”
“We’re meant to
have this future together. My wife—she really will want to kill me when she finds out the situation I’m in. She won’t cooperate.”
“I know people who can help you, Jacob,” I said, in the monotone of the half-asleep. “But I can’t help you. I like you, though. I really, really do.”
“What’s wrong with you? Have you ever seen a marble roll up like that? I mean, these are just little anomalies, I didn’t want to frighten you, but there are many others. Right here in this room, even. We have the symptoms of leaning up against time here.”
I thought of Jacob’s blathering on about Augustine and meaningful motion and yearning. I also felt convinced I’d been drugged. Not just because of my fatigue but because I was beginning to find Jacob vaguely attractive. His sweaty collarbone was pretty. The room around me—the futon, the Chinese food, the porcelain teacup, the rusty laboratory, the piles of papers, Ilan’s note in my back pocket, Jacob’s cheap dress socks, the dust, Jacob’s ringed hand on his knee—these all seemed like players in a life of mine that had not yet become real, a life I was coursing toward, one for which I would be happy to waste every bit of myself. “Do you think,” I found myself asking, maybe because I’d had this feeling just once before in my life, “that Ilan was a rare and tragic genius?”
Jacob laughed.
I shrugged. I leaned my sleepy head against his shoulder. I put my hand to his collarbone.
“I can tell you this about your future,” Jacob said quietly. “I didn’t not hear that question. So let me soothsay this. You’ll never get over Ilan. And that will one day horrify you. But soon enough you’ll settle on a replacement object for all that love of yours, which does you about as much good as a proverbial stick up the ass. Your present, if you’ll excuse my saying so, is a pretty sorry one. But your future looks pretty damn great. Your work will amount to nothing. But you’ll have a brilliant child. And a brilliant husband. And great love.”
He was saying we would be together. He was saying we would be in love. I understood. I had solved the puzzle. I knew who I, who we, were meant to be. I fell asleep relieved.
I woke up alone on Jacob’s futon. At first I couldn’t locate Jacob, but then I saw he was sleeping in his daughter’s loft. His mouth was open; he looked awful. The room smelled of MSG. I felt at once furious and small. I left the apartment, vowing never to go to the coffee shop—or anywhere else I might see Jacob—again. I spent my day grading student exams. That evening, I went to the video store and almost rented “Wuthering Heights,” then switched to “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” then, feeling haunted in a dumb way, ended up renting nothing at all.
Did I, in the following weeks and months, think of Jacob often? Did I worry for or care about him? I couldn’t tell if I did or didn’t, as if my own feelings had become the biggest mystery to me of all. I can’t even say I’m absolutely sure that Jacob was delusional. When King Laius abandons baby Oedipus in the mountains on account of the prophecy that his son will murder him, Laius’s attempt to evade his fate simply serves as its unexpected engine. This is called a predestination paradox. It’s a variant of the grandfather paradox. At the heart of it is your inescapable fate.
We know that the general theory of relativity is compatible with the existence of space-times in which travel to the past or remote future is possible. The logician Kurt Gödel proved this back in the late nineteen-forties, and it remains essentially undisputed. Whether or not humans (in our very particular space-time) can in fact travel to the past—we still don’t know. Maybe. Surely our world obeys rules still alien to our imaginations. Maybe Jacob is my destiny. Regardless, I continue to avoid him.
DALTHAREE
JEFFREY FORD
You’ve heard of bottled cities, no doubt —society writ miniscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pin-prick faces of the citizenry peering from office windows smaller than sequins. Hustle, politics, fervor, struggle, capitulation, wrapped in a crystal firmament, stoppered at the top to keep reality both in and out. Those microscopic lives, striking glass at the edge of things, believed themselves gigantic, their dilemmas universal.
Our research suggested that Daltharee had many multi-storied buildings carved right into its hillsides. Surrounding the city there was a forest with lakes and streams. and all of it was contained within a dome, like a dinner beneath the lid of a serving dish. When the inhabitants of Daltharee looked up they were prepared to not see the heavens. They knew that the light above, their Day, was generated by a machine, which they oiled and cared for. The stars that shone every sixteen hours when Day left darkness behind were simple bulbs regularly changed by a man in a hot air balloon.
They were convinced that the domed city floated upon an iceberg, which it actually did. There was one door in the wall of the dome at the end of a certain path through the forest. When opened, it led out onto the ice. The surface of the iceberg extended the margin of one of their miles all around the enclosure. Blinding snows fell, winds constantly roared in a perpetual blizzard. Their belief was that Daltharee drifted upon the oceans of an otherwise frozen world. They prayed for the end of eternal winter, so they might reclaim the continents.
And all of this: their delusions, the city, the dome, the iceberg, the two quarts of water it floated upon, were contained within an old gallon glass milk bottle, plugged at the top with a tattered handkerchief and painted dark blue. When I’d put my ear to the glass, I heard, like the ocean in a sea shell, fierce gales blowing.
Daltharee was not the product of a shrinking ray as many of these pint-size metropolises are. And please, there was no magic involved. In fact, once past the early stages of its birth it was more organically grown than shaped by artifice. Often, in the origin stories of these diminutive places, there’s a deranged scientist lurking in the wings. Here too we have the notorious Mando Paige, the inventor of sub-microscopic differentiated cell division and growth. What I’m referring to was Paige’s technique for producing super-miniature human cells. From the instant of their atomic origin, these parcels of life were beset by enzymatic reaction and electric stunting the way tree roots are tortured over time to create a bonsai. Paige shaped human life in the form of tiny individuals. They landscaped and built the city, laid roads, and lurched in a sleep-walking stupor induced by their creator.
Once the city in the dome was completed, Paige introduced more of the crumb-sized citizenry through the door that opened onto the iceberg. Just before closing that door, he set off a device that played an A flat for approximately ten seconds, a pre-ordained spur to consciousness, which brought them all awake to their lives in Daltharee. Seeding the water in the gallon bottle with crystal ions, he soon after introduced a chemical mixture that formed a slick, unmelting ice-like platform beneath the floating dome. He then introduced into the atmosphere fenathol nitrate, silver iodite, anamidian betheldine, to initiate the frigid wind and falling snow. When all was well within the dome, when the iceberg had sufficiently grown, when winter ruled, he plugged the gallon bottle with an old handkerchief. That closed system of winter, with just the slightest amount of air allowed in through the cloth was sustainable forever, feeding wind to snow and snow to cold to claustrophobia and back again in an infinite loop. The Dalthareens made up the story about a frozen world to satisfy the unknown. Paige manufactured three more of these cities, each wholly different from the others, before laws were passed about the imprisonment of humanity, no matter how minute or unaware. He was eventually, himself, imprisoned for his crimes.
We searched for a method to study life inside the dome but were afraid to disturb its delicate nature, unsure whether simply removing the handkerchief would upset a brittle balance between inner and outer universes. It was suggested that a very long, exceedingly thin probe that had the ability to twist and turn by computational command could be shimmied in between the edge of the bottle opening and the cloth of the handkerchief. This probe, like the ones physicians used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to
read the hieroglyphics of the bowel, would be fitted out with both a camera and a microphone. The device was adequate for those cities that didn’t have the extra added boundary of a dome, but even in them, how incongruous, a giant metal snake just out of the blue, slithering through one’s reality. The inhabitants of these enclosed worlds were exceedingly small but not stupid.
In the end it was my invention that won the day—a voice activated transmitter the size of two atoms was introduced into the bottle. We had to wait for it to work its way from the blizzard atmosphere, through the dome’s air filtration system, and into the city. Then we had to wait for it to come in contact with a voice. At any point a thousand things could have gone wrong, but one day, six months later, who knows how many years that would be in Dalthareen time, the machine transmitted and my receiver picked up conversations from the domed city. Here’s an early one we managed to record that had some interesting elements:
“I’m not doing that now. Please, give me some room . . . ” she said.
There is a long pause filled with the faint sound of a utensil clinking a plate.
“I was out in the forest the other day,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” he told her.
“What do you do out there?” she asked.
“I’m in this club,” he said. “We got together to try to find the door in the wall of the dome.”
“How did that go?” she asked.
“We knew it was there and we found it,” he said. “Just like in the old stories . . . ”
“Blizzard?”
“You can’t believe it,” he said.
“Did you go out in it?”
“Yes, and when I stepped back into the dome, I could feel a piece of the storm stuck inside me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.
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